First Paper draft generation

For this paper, I want you guys to practice selecting quotes that work with an already defined thesis. So:

Let’s look at the very first sentence of “Letter to My Son,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates: “Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body." (My italics.) Later on in the same paragraph, Coates writes that when the host “turned to the subject of [his] body [...] she did not mention it specifically.” We can therefore assume (even before Coates informs us that her question is about “why [he] [feels] that white America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence”) that when the host asks Coates “what it mean[s] to lose [his] body,” she’s not using those specific words. “What does it mean to lose your body?” should, instead, be read as Coates’s translation of her question. The implication, here, is that her question is meaningful only when it is translated into the language of personal and specific physical violence, directed at the individual body.

In other words, what Coates is very deliberately saying, at the very beginning of this essay, is that, for him, American progress is predicated on the plundering of his body--not a generic body, not even an abstract black body--but his. He’s saying that he feels the injustices of American history as a personal violence directed every day at him—his specific flesh; his specific blood. If “Letter to My Son” is Coates’s answer to the question of “what it [means] to lose [his] body,” we can only understand that answer by unpacking what it means for Coates to be a body, to be living in his specific body in America.

Why does Coates position himself, within the larger American debate about history and race, as a specific body? How does this clarify or change the terms of that debate?
In this essay, we’ll endeavor to answer these questions, through a close reading of Coates’s use of “body”--his insistence on the individuality of the bodies (and the specific physicality of the violence) involved in institutional racism.

So how do we go about doing this?


We could look at every single place Coates talks about the body / specific physical acts / specific bodies. But that would take a lot of looking.

If our claim is that Coates is saying that institutional racism can only be meaningfully analysed when we consider the specific acts of violence (physical and mental/spiritual/cultural) done to specific bodies, then we need to find places in the text where Coates is translating from the language of the host in the first paragraph--the language that avoids talking about bodies.

Find at least 3-4 quotes that do this.

Sample quotes/ sample notes/commentary:

Quotes in which the language of the “host”—the language that leaves out specific bodies, that elides actual real violence—is translated into the language of the question “what does it mean [to me] to lose my body”:

Coates is basically saying this exact same thing here:

“But all our phrasing—race relations,racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling,white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth.”

What he’s saying is that the words disguise the violence. There's a difference between saying that there is racial profiling and that it is likely to lead to violence, and saying that the effects are felt as broken bones, as broken teeth. The italicized terms he lists makes real violence sterile, manageable. Hides it. Sweeps it under the rug. Easy to think about in a superficial way; easy therefore to dismiss--to say "oh, I know about that" because you're familiar with the terms/phrases. You don't have to be familiar with the actuality of it, the real effects. You don't need personal experience or listen to personal experience, in other words--you just have to have thought about the words.

          Another really obvious example here is the extended meditation on what it might have meant to be a specific black enslaved female body:

 Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. 

“Slavery”—the word—translated into individual physical experience. ("Why is he doing this? What does Coates gain by having the reader think about this?"--these are good questions to ask.)

Note the particularity of this description: the light falling in one particular spot in the woods, the specificity of the enjoyment of the place where the water eddies--lots of use of "the"; of the definite article, which implies that whatever the "the" applies to is singular, unique, real. "A favorite cousin, a favorite season" sounds like Coates is transposing his own specific likes on to this woman, fleshing her out; using details from his own life to make hers more real. In a very literal sense, he's identifying himself with her, this imagined woman. And implicitly, asking us to do the same. Imagine all of the specifics of your own life, your own body, whatever scars on your hands or feet, your own likes, dislikes, your own peculiarities, everything that belongs to you and your own unique inner life--and imagine this woman who has the same--who is just as real and just as unique. And imagine her in "endless dark." In "eternal damnation." Imagine yourself there. --is the move he's asking us to make.  

Experience at Howl’s Moving Castle—altercation with man who says “I could have you arrested!”—which for Coates, I think, is an admission of the power differential—the white man in this case finds it easy/natural to say “I could have you arrested!”: evidence (he would probably say) for the lingering structural effects of an American history in which it is "traditional to destroy the black body." 

I came home shook. It was a mix of shame for having gone back to the law of the streets, and rage—“I could have you arrested!” Which is to say: “I could take your body.”

Alternately, quotes in which Coates is pointing out places where individual bodies are—let’s call it buried under the words:

          The distinction between “black” and “white” might itself be such an instance, for Coates?

          For example: 
“There will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all of history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been ‘black.’” 

Actual body irrelevant to category of race, in this instance; actual body ignored in the same way that the host’s question ignores bodies.